Chapter One #2
met my mom when she’s visited Boston, all of us going out for brunch or a walk on the Common. They dubbed her “adorable.”
They’ve never met my dad. They know the broad strokes—that one day he just up and left, apparently deciding he’d actually
never been happy, and after literally jetting off to Alaska and then disappearing into the Canadian wilderness for a month
on a cross-country train trip, he reemerged with a new girlfriend, a stepdaughter, and a reinvented personality.
“I’m going to tell him,” I say to Rika and Yasmin. “I just want to get to this cottage first and get settled. I’ll go from
there.”
“All right.” Rika nods slowly. “That makes sense.”
“Totally fair,” Yasmin agrees.
I can hear it—how careful they’re being, voices mild and un-pushy. The tone that says they’re walking on eggshells, because
Harlowe is fragile.
For an awful second, I catch myself wishing they’d fight me on this. Tell me I should call my dad right now. Tell me I’m being
unreasonable, even if I’m not. Give me some reason to get angry. Some reason to yell. Some reason to be something other than
fine.
Jackson wasn’t angry when I finally called it—told him I was done. We were done.
Neither of us yelled. He said he was glad we could be mature about this.
And I nodded, because of course I wanted to be mature. I’m thirty-one. I’m an adult.
And still, a tiny part of me wished he’d get angry, just so I could finally be angry back at him.
“How about some tunes?” I pick up my phone, quickly swiping aside the missed call notification from my dad. I don’t wait for
an answer, just hit play on an album by an indie artist Rika, Yasmin, and I went to see at Club Passim once when Jackson was
away at a conference. Indie guitars and slightly out-of-tune piano fill up the car. Yasmin drums their fingers along on their
knee and Rika goes back to scrolling on her phone.
The farther out on the Cape we go, the more the trees seem to take over. We pass the occasional small town, with signs for
B and Bs and cottages and trailheads, a Cumberland Farms, a trailer rental that sits like an island in the middle of all the
green. I’d almost believe there was nothing much out here, except for the number of cars on the road, and more of those peel
off the farther out we get.
Once we pass a sign for Wellfleet, I turn down the music and grab a piece of paper off the dashboard, holding it out to Rika. “Okay, I think the turn is supposed to come up soon. What’s that say?”
Rika frowns at the page and then at me. “I thought you had the directions on your phone.”
“Well, apparently Google Maps can’t find the cottage’s actual location. The closest town is Wellfleet, so I put that in, but
Dina sent these directions for the last leg.” I point to the paper.
“Wow, so this place really is out in the boonies,” Yasmin says.
Rika studies the directions. “Okay, the turn is called Great Hollow Road and it’s on the left after Marconi’s Beach Outfitters.”
“Which is probably that, right?” Yasmin points to a barnlike blue building with beach chairs, flotation rings, and a giant
inflatable flamingo out front. Sure enough, there’s a sign near the road that says Marconi’s: Beach Gear she said she lived next door.
I pull up behind an old Toyota 4Runner with rust wearing through its silver paint and turn off the car.
“Is this it?” Rika asks.
“Yeah, I think so.” I open my car door.
A breeze ruffles my hair as I climb out, cool and gentle and vaguely salty.
The air actually moves here, unlike the still, humid pall hanging over Boston when we left.
It’s probably a good ten degrees cooler too.
All around the clearing are skinny birch trees, low shrubs, an occasional knot of wildflowers.
And it’s quiet. No roar of traffic. No blare of distant sirens or car horns.
The only sound is the hum of insects and a faint rushing sound I can’t quite place.
“Wow.” Rika shades her eyes as she climbs out, squinting into the distance. “Is that the ocean?”
Yasmin slams their door. “Yeah, looks like it.”
On one side of the house, the ground plunges away steeply, going from scrubby grass and shrubs to rolling dunes and, far below,
bright sand. Beyond the sand is a sliver of sparkling blue water, disappearing into a wide blue sky. That explains the rushing
sound—I can see waves lapping gently against the beach.
I take a breath; it goes deeper than any breath I’ve taken recently. Like a weight on my chest—a weight I didn’t even realize
was there—has vanished, and my lungs can finally expand again.
“You want to unload?” Yasmin asks.
I tear my eyes away from the sunlight dancing on the waves. “Dina said to ring her doorbell when I got here.” I look back
up at the house in front of me. “So I guess we should do that first?”
There’s a brick path on the side of the house that faces away from the ocean, and the land falls away more gently on this
side, past flower beds that gradually give way to knots of shrubs and trees that lead down into a ravine. In the distance,
I see a couple other rooftops pop up through the trees, but they must be far away—they look small enough to be dollhouses.
We follow the brick path up to a front porch of weathered wood and a shockingly yellow front door. A hand-painted driftwood
sign on the door says Welcome to the Beach.
A shiver of anxiety goes through my stomach, and for a second, I hesitate, while a tiny part of me wonders what I’m doing
here. If I’m really going to spend an entire summer in a place I’ve never been, renting a house from a stranger. If this is
really the best way to escape.
And then I take another deep breath, and my lungs expand again, and I press the doorbell.